Not as it appears

Our Daily Bread
I remember the first time I saw a drag queen.  I was very surprised to learn that this beautiful woman was really a guy.  Since that event decades ago, there have been TV shows and movies with drag queens that have made their stories more well known.  As I learned back then, all is not what it appears to be!

Simeon seemed to know the same kind of thing about the birth of Jesus.  Yes, this was a wonderful, miraculous event that was celebrated by singing angels, a star hovering over his birth place and kings bringing him gifts beyond compare.  It was an amazing event.  Simeon looked on and knew from God how the story would end.  He tried to tell Mary the best he could.  She tried to understand the best she could.  Like so many other things in her life, I can imagine her hiding these things in her heart!

Yes, we know the rest of the story as written in the Bible.  We have the ups and downs and the glory of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  We have the victory of his resurrection and his ascension into heaven to the right hand of God.  What a story!  No wonder the Bible says that the skies could not hold all the things that could be written about our God!

Lord, we thank you for giving your perspective about how our lives should be and about how our world should be.  Please help us do our part to make this heaven on earth!

Simply Saturday
Smaug
Yes, I am a big movie buff.  I also like Tolkien (and CS Lewis).  I went to see the movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug after work last night (the first day the movie was out).  You will have to wait until Movie Monday to read my review of the movie!  Something in the movie spurred me to write this entry for Simply Saturday.

Without giving away what is in the movie, I can tell you that the dwarves are trying to take back their underground home that was stolen by the dragon, Smaug.  They were warned over and over NOT to wake the dragon if it still lived, but they took the chance any way.  What does this have to do with today's blog entry?

I thought about how so many of us (OK, I mean me) keep "rousing the dragon" in our lives.  There are things in our lives that we need to let sleep.  I am not talking about hard feelings or situations that we know we need to address so we can be the best Christians we can be.  I am talking about things like an alcoholic taking just one drink, a bipolar person not taking their meds because she feels fine, or a diabetic eating a box of Hohos because their blood sugar wasn't that high today.  Whew...  If we think about it and truly admit it to ourselves, we know these dragons will wreak havoc on our lives.  We know it, but we still rouse them any way.

Let us pray for each other.  Let us pray that we leave our sleeping dragons sleeping through the healing and seemingly magical powers of the Holy Spirit!

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“Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen” (Eph. 3:20-21 niv).